This Week in Geek (12-18/05/08)

Buys

My roommate has an Xbox 360 and finally decided to spring for Grand Theft Auto IV. Well, that certainly explains the early onset of arthritis. As a big fan of both Vice City and San Andreas, you can bet I'll be logging on a lot of hours on this baby. After two days on shared custody, I'm at 15.90%.

"Accomplishments"

Reads: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, a gorgeous little novella about the very last case of Sherlock Holmes (simply called "the detective" or "the old man" throughout). Chabon's usual mastery of prose is on show, and he makes use of the shifting point of view to clever effect (after all, the previous POV, Watson, isn't in the story). A beautiful tale I thought was way too short (but then I thought his Kavalier & Clay was too short and it was a brick), but the book is padded out with "DVD extras" like an interview and Chabon's own genre recommendations.

Over in the DVD section, I flipped Doctor Who #70, i.e. The Time Warrior. It's a 3rd Doctor story with a lot of geek cred: 1st appearances of Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans, 1st mention of Gallifrey, a guest role for the actor who played Bobba Fett, and costumes by the same guy who made the Spider-Man suit in the movies. The story by Robert Holmes is good too, and there's a nice CGI effects feature that undoes a lot of lame directorial decisions (plus the making of, commentary tracks, etc.). I watched and then I watched again, and then I made cards from it for the Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG. I'm like that.

Monday's role-playing session went well. A time travel tale set inside the Arthurian legend as evil aliens try to wipe it from pseudo-history. It's a two-parter, so I don't want to get into it too much until our next update, but you can sleep easy knowing Arthur HAS been born. My lusty, shameless version of Uther Pendragon got a nomination for NPC of the year, so he should be proud of himself.

Someone Else's Post of the WeekMichael May takes the honors this week with a post about Jungle Tales and Racism. If you're also into half-naked jungle people, dinosaurs and talking gorillas (and who around these parts ISN'T?), then you could do worse than check it out.